Re: The Next Generation of Republicans

"When he hits Hollywood or the media, it feels good. When he targets the disabled or immigrants, it feels less satisfying. “Young people understand that it is a diverse society. They want to be tolerant of each other,” Shapiro says. His biggest worry about Trump is that he might “toxify” the party so much, young people will never vote for Republicans again."

Well they they need to speak up. Otherwise, I assume they agree, and are complete hypocrites about civil rights for all.

In another post I encouraged everyone to look up a guy named Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov. Former KGB. I was told a site called BIG THINK had picked up a 1984 interview in which he outlined a long term plan to defeat the US. They carefully analyzed the United States weaknesses and set about to systematically exploit them. Try to get access to the interview to see how deliberately calculated this thing may be. Remember this was a long time ago. A long, long, long time ago by today's technology standards. There it is.

I’ve seen it on my Facebook feed, but didn’t click on it. I’ll look it up.

Re: The Next Generation of Republicans

"When he hits Hollywood or the media, it feels good. When he targets the disabled or immigrants, it feels less satisfying. “Young people understand that it is a diverse society. They want to be tolerant of each other,” Shapiro says. His biggest worry about Trump is that he might “toxify” the party so much, young people will never vote for Republicans again."

Well they they need to speak up. Otherwise, I assume they agree, and are complete hypocrites about civil rights for all.

In another post I encouraged everyone to look up a guy named Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov. Former KGB. I was told a site called BIG THINK had picked up a 1984 interview in which he outlined a long term plan to defeat the US. They carefully analyzed the United States weaknesses and set about to systematically exploit them. Try to get access to the interview to see how deliberately calculated this thing may be. Remember this was a long time ago. A long, long, long time ago by today's technology standards. There it is.

Re: The Next Generation of Republicans

"When he hits Hollywood or the media, it feels good. When he targets the disabled or immigrants, it feels less satisfying. “Young people understand that it is a diverse society. They want to be tolerant of each other,” Shapiro says. His biggest worry about Trump is that he might “toxify” the party so much, young people will never vote for Republicans again."

Well they they need to speak up. Otherwise, I assume they agree, and are complete hypocrites about civil rights for all.

The Next Generation of Republicans

How Trumpian are they? I interviewed 52 young conservatives to find out.

When, in October 2016, it was time to build the border wall — or at least a plywood replica on the campus of Washington State University — the job fell to Jacob Heinen. He was only a freshman, but he was one of the few College Republicans who knew how to work with his hands. When he was done, he spray-painted TRUMP across the wall in gold, then stood back and watched as a crowd of classmates showed up to protest his creation.

To Heinen, a conservative kid from a farming town, the stunt seemed like a good idea. He resented paying thousands of dollars to attend a school where he felt unwelcome. He saw liberal students as unwilling to engage in neutral debate; they treated political disagreements not as intellectual differences, he felt, but as moral ones. It was as if you came to college “just to learn why your political ideology makes you a horrible person,” Heinen told me. “It was [cast as]: If you were a good person, you’d believe in gun reform. If you were a good person, you’d believe in single-payer health care.” Even though Donald Trump hadn’t been his preferred choice for the GOP nomination, he liked that the candidate’s confrontational message gave College Republicans an opening to challenge the left’s dominance on campus. And the closer Trump got to winning in November, the more allies Heinen found: In 2016, he recalls, the WSU College Republicans increased their numbers from a half-dozen students to more than 40.

But after Trump won the presidency, Heinen wanted to move on from provocations like the wall to more civil discourse. His fellow College Republicans disagreed. He says they wanted to extend a speaking invitation to alt-right darling Milo Yiannopoulos. So Heinen quietly left the group. A few months later, when it emerged that the president of the WSU College Republicans had attended the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Heinen, who was starting a bipartisan political science club, made his resignation public.

When I spoke to Heinen by phone in March, he seemed exhausted by the president whose tactics he had once emulated. “I take it case-by-case. Neil Gorsuch and tax reform were awesome,” he said, referring to Trump’s nomination of the conservative Gorsuchto the Supreme Court in 2017. “But he’s also done really, really horrible things.” Although Trump’s election had done much to shape his college experience, Heinen insisted that the president hasn’t influenced his worldview. “What are Donald Trump’s political beliefs?” he asked. “You watch Twitter for an hour, and he changes his mind four times.”

I spoke to Heinen as part of a project to figure out how the next generation of Republican leaders is thinking about politics. Are they Trump supporters? Trump skeptics? Some mix of both? To try to answer these questions, I interviewed 52 young conservative leaders nationwide, most in their early 20s, in the hope of finding common threads, or illuminating differences, that might tell us where conservatism as a whole is going in the decades to come.

My initial challenge was to find a representative sample. I started with the College Republicans, a national organization with more than 250,000 members, figuring that this was where I’d find the future elected officials, donors, staffers, consultants, activists and writers who would someday define the post-Trump GOP. But I knew that the College Republicans wouldn’t give the full picture of what it is to be a young conservative today. There are more ideological sects, like William F. Buckley Jr.’s Young Americans for Freedom, founded in 1960, and the Leadership Institute, founded by a Reagan acolyte in 1979, plus newer groups including Young Americans for Liberty, a libertarian offshoot of Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign, and the pro-Trump Turning Point USA, founded in 2012. I talked to members of all these factions, along with editors of conservative campus newspapers; people on Newsmax’s and Red Alert Politics’ “30 Under 30” lists; Christian leaders; staffers at the antiabortion group Students for Life of America; the founder of Students for Trump; and members of the conservative Network of Enlightened Women.

(My sample was in no way scientific, and it had notable omissions. I did not, for instance, seek out the white supremacists of the alt-right. I also conducted these interviews prior to the major political events of recent weeks — chief among them Trump’s family-separation policy at the border andSupreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s retirement.

After talking to these young conservatives, I can report a few things that are generally true. Most see Trump as an imperfect means of implementing their favored policies. They’ve been pleasantly surprised by what he has delivered: Gorsuch, the tax law, deregulation. They wish Trump wouldn’t tweet like that. Almost none cared about special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into possible Trump campaign-Russia collusion. The most admired person in the administration is U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley — and that’s because she stands up to Trump.

Perhaps the most striking thing is that Trumpism has not swamped more varied modes of conservative thought among young leaders. This is arguably in contrast to the trend in Washington, where fewer and fewer Republican politicians seem willing to defy Trump. Among young conservatives, there are plenty of Trumpists — as Heinen’s experience with his fellow Republicans at Washington State shows. Yet there are also many young conservatives like Heinen who are not falling uniformly in line behind Trump and his worldview.

Among the young people I spoke to, there were — in addition to Trump acolytes — pragmatists who support Trump as a vehicle to achieve their goals, moderates who feel pushed out of the party, libertarians who see Trump’s disruption as a chance to redefine conservatism, traditionalists for whom Trump’s character doesn’t fit the conservative brand, and loyal establishment types trying to keep everyone together. Oddly enough, the person who appeared to be doing the most to shape the thinking of the new generation of Republican leaders was not the president of the United States — but Ben Shapiro, a 34-year-old anti-Trump conservative pundit who came up unprompted in more than a third of my conversations. (More on Shapiro’s influence later.)

Heinen was one of the first people I talked to, and, in his complicated views, he turned out to be representative. He spoke about the Trump presidency with a sense of buyer’s remorse. Poking liberals has been a defining feature of campus conservatism for decades, and Heinen had built his wall in that tradition, not really considering whether Trump might actually get elected. After Trump won, Heinen suddenly had to reconcile his happiness about a conservative team in the White House with a growing apprehension that its rhetoric was dividing campus — and American — culture.

“When Donald Trump was elected, I wondered, ‘Where do we go from here?’ ” he told me. “What made Trump ‘Trump’ was saying outrageous things. That was fine when he was campaigning. But now he has to make policy, and that means working with people on the other side.”